Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 12, 2012 @10:27AM
from the actually-it's-the-illness-that-does dept.

First time accepted submitter dmr001 writes "In its fortnightly Communicable Disease newsletter (PDF), Oregon Public Health officials note increasing cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in infants, with 146 hospitalizations noted in the 2 year period ending March 2011, and at least 4 deaths since 2003. Most cases are attributed to lack of vaccination, with 86% of those due to parents declining the vaccine. 'Most of our cases are occurring in under- or unvaccinated children, so getting these kids vaccinated seems to the most obvious approach to reducing illness. In principle... pertussis could be eradicated; but we have a long way to go.'"

I personally think control and blame are two of the major unspoken reasons that the vaccine explanation was more readily accepted by parents. If the cause was genetics, that would be outside of their ability to control. Withholding vaccines are within their control. If vaccines were the culprit then parents could blame doctors, the medical establishment, and vaccine companies instead of blaming themselves (If the problem was hereditary, parents shouldn't blame themselves but most will feel guilt anyways.). The current speculation is de novo genetic mutations (mutations near or soon after conception) is the mechanism for autism and hopefully will give parents some relief that it wasn't their fault.

The thing is, there's no denying that genetics is, at the very least, a major component of autism. Just look at autism rates in children from autistic parents. I remember reading that companies like Microsoft (and other tech giants as you'll certainly find higher autism rates among programmers, mathematicians, etc) were actually adding treatment, therapy, etc for autistic children to their medical benefits.

My wife loves me, and we've talked about having kids a fair bit. At first we were discussing things and then I started hearing her opinions on modern medicine etc.

All I had to do was explain to her, with the scientific evidence included, why she was wrong, and then, since as any man knows that isn't going to actually work, flat out make her choose between her backwards ideals and me. I wasn't an asshole about it, but I calmly explained that I wanted children, and if we weren't going to do what is best for their happiness and survival then the relationship was going to end at some point in the future unless she changed her mind.

She picked me. If she hadn't, I've have been sad for awhile, but knowing that I wouldn't have to lose a child to Hepatitis or something years from now would have more than made up for it.

More men need to start standing their ground on this stuff. A lot of men back down for fear of losing their loved one or

This is the age of science, and men tend to think more with their heads and less with their hearts. Now is the time where "Mom knows best" isn't always the best option.

When it comes to apple pies, talking the kid through their first relationship issues, things like that, Mom definitely still knows best. For most everyday things, Mom is the answer. Most of our lives revolve around social interaction of one type or another, which women, on average, excel at in comparison to men.

However in the age of our advanced state of medical knowledge, and informed, rational decision is what is needed. If Mom is going to do that, then you're in the clear. If Mom is not going to do that, then its time to grow a pair of balls and step in.

Now, before anyone screams, yes there are a lot of generalizations in there. These are true, on the AVERAGE. If you're a woman in one of those relatively-speaking "rare" situations where the shoe is on the other foot, then you need to do the same thing.

My wife is an RN (nurse) and I'm an IT guy. We've had a few disagreements on medical issues, although we're mostly on the same page now.

My wife was of the opinion that medical professionals are right and always have a good excuse for everything they do. I was rather ambivalent. As we were approaching birth, the issue of circumcision came up. We come from an area where men are usually circumcised, presumably for health reasons although it's really more about that being what everybody else does, and everybody in both of our families has been circumcised. I had read a little on the issue, and had decided that circumcision is not necessary since we aren't doing it for religious reasons. My wife, being a medical professional had encountered a few men who had been circumcised in their 70s, and was certain it was better to circumcise 100% of infants instead of leaving them intact and circumcising the 2% who end up having it done as adults when it became necessary. I fought her hard on the issue, and she gave in. Then she decided to tell her mother, also a nurse, who fought my wife on the issue in favor of cutting even harder than than my wife fought me. In the end my wife had to tell her mom that she didn't get a vote, and she wasn't going to get me to OK it. Now, my wife is firmly in the don't cut camp.

Concerning vaccinations, my wife leans pro and I am a little less pro, but I haven't fought on the issue because I haven't studied the issue much, and bad effects are probably not cause by getting a shot, although it might be a good idea to find out how certain injections are made.

Concerning autism, my wife found a treatment for our first daughter's issues which may work on autistic children and adults. Anybody interested in this should research Interactive Metronome therapy. Anybody who knows somebody with autism should look into this. My wife suspects that our daughter's issues were cause by trauma from our daughter getting stuck in the birth canal, not vaccines, genetics, or other issues. I could definitely see this running in families, since circumstances surrounding birth, mother and doctor from one birth to the next could stay the same, making researchers think there is a genetic link when it's a repeatable environmental connection.

Doctors are not always 100% correct. They are human, and invariably humans all make mistakes.

Besides which, however much a lot of RN's like to claim they know a lot about medicine, the reality is that they generally don't. I know a fair number of nurses, and it sometimes scares me some of the things that I consider to be relatively common knowledge(probably because I do a lot of reading), or at least definitely should be common knowledge in the medical profession, that they don't know.

That said, doctors are right 95% of the time. Thus you should probably follow their advice 95% of the time. When its really important, like a vaccine that could potentially have side effects on your kid, when there are alternate vaccines or something available, you should research the issue, and inform yourself, and then make an informed decision.

Despite what some people think, learning a lot about one particular issue isn't very daunting. It would only take a few evenings of diligent research to find out about a lot of the vaccines they want to give your child, and if there are alternatives.

If you can't manage to spend a few evenings doing that, then you shouldn't have kids(IMHO)

To be fair, if vaccines caused autism, I would probably opt out of most vaccines, because most kids don't die of whooping cough or scarlet fever, but autism is forever. It might be rational, depending on the prevalence and severity of the disease, to decline a vaccination.

But, vaccines don't cause autism, and we know that absolutely 100% for a fact. We don't even have to do fancy science to prove it (although we have done that fancy science), because we can simply look at autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated kids. If there is no correlation between vaccines and autism, then that precludes the possibility of causation; and there is no correlation, therefore there is no causation.

Assuming the claims of the Playboy centerfold are true, the death rate from whooping cough is around 0.5% which is much higher then the rate of autism. In other words, even if there was a correlation between vacines and autism, the vacines are still safer.

Also-- and this can't be stressed enough-- autism is not contagious. If vaccines did cause autism (which they do not), getting a vaccine would only put your child at risk. Not getting vaccines puts other people's children at risk too. Your kid might not die from whooping cough, but the fact that your kid gets sick means that he's exposing other children to the disease, and they might die.

Nope, because immunizations aren't perfect. They *greatly* reduce the likelihood and severity of infection which stops contagious diseases from spreading, but it's not impossible for an immunized child to become infected and die. When you don't immunize your child, you are not just gambling with your child's life. You're gambling with the lives of the people your child comes in contact with.

Also all the other potentially fatal diseases that almost no one gets anymore because of vaccines. It's not really an exaggeration to say that in the days before vaccines, nearly everyone got at least one potentially fatal disease in childhood. Only a small fraction of those actually were fatal of course, but nearly everyone got something that could kill them at some point in early childhood. Of those that weren't killed, maiming was far more common than it is now. Autism may be forever, but so is hearing/sight loss from extreme fevers (surely everyone remembers Helen Keller) or partial/total leg paralysis from Polio. Ever read about someone being "pock-marked" in historical fiction or fantasy? It refers to the horrifying scarring that accompanies the survival of small pox. Makes the worst acne scars you've ever seen seem like some unpleasant bumps.

Even if every single case of autism on record could be directly attributed to vaccine side effects, it would still make sense to continue most of our current vaccination schedule. You could maybe drop a few of the more "optional" ones like chicken pox if that were the case (and it's not). Between diseases based fatalities, and the crippling effects even on some survivors of these diseases it makes zero sense to stop doing them.

You are 100% correct - the guy that did that study (autism linked to vaccinations) has been totally discredited - I guess some people didn't get the memo - but yea its really disturbing that some idiot parent that doesn't vaccinate their child put's my child at risk - its totally not cool

Yeah. Andrew Wakefield. He might currently be the world's most discredited scientist. For profit motive, he has made children sick and die -- hundreds, maybe thousands of them. In fact, for sickness, certainly thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.

Even more unfortunately is it's not just the children of these retards that suffer. Immunizations aren't perfect, and there is a group of people for which it doesn't take. There is another group of people who can't get vaccinated due to weakened immune systems. These groups are highly at risk due to the actions of the retards, as well.

No vaccine is 100% effective. Let's pretend that the vaccine in question has a 1% 'failure rate' (it doesn't result in a sufficiently strong immune response to render the treated individual immune to that 'bug'). If you vaccinate 100% of the population, then only a small fraction (1%) can actually catch the 'bug'. The fact that the other 99% of the population is immune greatly reduces the odds of that 'bug' being caught by *anyone*, much less a significant portion of that 1%.

Now, let's pretend the same vaccine is only administered to 75% of the population. Now, instead of having 1% who aren't immune, you've got (roughly) 26% who aren't immune. Suddenly, an outbreak is possible (even likely) because so many more people can catch and transmit the 'bug'. Worse, you've got a segment of the remaining 74% who would *normally* be protected from the virus by the immunization, but whose immune system isn't strong enough to fend off a sustained 'attack'. Now they're vulnerable, too.

It's a sliding scale, but I agree, in my opinion failure to vaccinate is criminal-level negligence. The legal question is, can a reasonable person decide not to vaccinate, and in my opinion the answer is no; only unreasonable people can do that.

Sadly, a lot of anti-vax people will actually claim that Pertussis isn't a deadly disease. One of the big anti-vax folks in Australia once said "Nobody's ever died of Whooping Cough." (This, after a four-week old baby died of it. The anti-vax lady claimed the baby must have been something else.) If they don't claim this, then they'll claim that vaccines really don't fight diseases and all you really need to do is wash your hands more/take more vitamins/avoid "toxins"/take some homeopathic pills/etc. (T

Actually the OP notes that 86% "opted out" of vaccination. That remaining 14% is going to include children who can't be vaccinated, or for whom the vaccine doesn't work (i.e. does not convey immunity, for whatever reason).

Both those two groups get no real choice in their vulnerability, but they are affected by the 86% who are being parented by idiots.

People forget that not everyone can be immunized. The people who can't be immunized rely on herd immunity to prevent a disease from spreading to the point that it is dangerous. When you get large number of people opting out of immunization, the herd immunity becomes too weak to prevent a disease from taking hold and spreading. Once it starts spreading, the likelihood for a non-immunized person to catch it can shoot up dramatically.

This is me with the Measles Mumps Rhebelum shots. I've had the vaccination six different times in the last ten years because I keep coming up on tests as not immunized. Just doesn't take. Every school I've gone to (three undergrads, a year abroad with two schools, and law school) has had me tested, objected to the lack of MMR vaccination, and insisted on poking me three times trying to fix that. Not gonna happen.

Of course not. And no honest doctor or scientist ever claims vaccines work 100%. But they are *very* effective and your protection goes up dramatically if those around you are vaccinated (so even if it doesn't work for you there are few people around you for you to be infected from). This is all well known and understood by everyone with a medical degree. People who learned science as a pin-up girl and Playboy Bunny seem to have missed this class...

Read up on herd immunity [wikipedia.org]. A large part of the effectiveness of vaccines is that beyond the individual protection they confer on most recipients, they also protect the unvaccinated and the ones that the vaccine wasn't effective for if the overall rate of vaccination is high enough.

That's why the people who choose not to vaccinate their kids are also increasing the risk for the kids that did get the vaccine but for whom it wasn't effective for some reason, the kids that haven't been vaccinated yet because they're too young, and the kids that for some reason - e.g. compromised immune system - can't get the vaccine at all.

No, what the article actually said was, that among the _completely unvaccinated_, the _reason_ for lack of vaccination in 86% of cases was parental refusal. That doesn't say that 14% were vaccinated: it says that in 14% of unvaccinated cases the lack of vaccination was _not_assigned to parental refusal as the cause.

I'm afraid this is how numerical data gets mashed into garble.

After considering the other numerical data the authors of the report concluded that "declining the vaccine carries a whopping risk for pertussis" (p.2).

Of course it will never be 100%. NOTHING is ever 100%, medically or otherwise, short of math (and even then..)

By your argument, nobody should wear seatbelts and helmets because they dont stop all deaths and injuries. Thats absurd and misleading.

If these idiots had gotten their children vaccinated when eligable, the people who dont have a choice on not getting vaccinated have a GREATLY INCREAED CHANCE OF NOT GETTING SICK if everyone else does what they're supposed to. Sorry, this isn't Disneyland, people get sick sometimes no matter what you do. Doesn't mean we should all roll around in the mud and jab one another with dirty needles either.

I don't know. I despise anti-vaxxers, but I'm not sure it should be expressly illegal for many of the reasons listed above. Conversely, it is in no way comparable to population control policies (which it should be noted, are largely implemented via the absence of tax breaks for the second and third child etc.)

As a society, we should be getting vaccines because we collectively agree its the right thing to do - not because we force people too. Down that path when it comes to medicine is nothing good.

The reverse is, of course, total anarchy, but you're obviously perfectly fine with that, right? I mean, if the government CAN'T dictate vaccinations, it can't dictate gun laws or assault or anything else! Thunderdome!!

you're a moron. your opinion is based on abject fear and a pathological lack of basic human trust. the government in a democracy is an extension of the will of the people, not an alien rights abusing machine, despite whatever antisocial hysteria your feeble mind harbors

i'm really sick of retards like you polluting the conversation on subjects like this. there IS such a thing as the common good, and it will be enforced, in the name of THE PEOPLE. now go scream about the fascist government giving you anal pro

Your comment spawned an idea for me. I wouldn't have a problem with people not getting vaccinated if they could be held liable for the results of their negligence. So if someone decides that their child won't get vaccinated and my child can't (for age or medical reason) but then contracts some horrible disease from the child who's parent decided not to have them vaccinated then the parent who chose to not have their child vaccinated would have to pay the bills. If my child dies then charge the parent who decided to not have the child vaccinated with negligent homicide. This would allow anyone to be a stupid as they want (we don't have many laws against people doing stupid things but that is increasing) but as soon as it affects someone else then there is recourse. Given that one can sue anyone for anything (whether it holds up in court is different) I am surprised someone hasn't tried this already to test the legal waters.

And in doing so, you're opting for the far more expensive option.#1 You will be dealing with far more outbreaks than if you would make vaccinations mandatory, which is significantly more expensive to the government and society as a whole.#2 You will have to expand the very expensive police and court system to deal with the additional cases coming in. This also costs a lot of money.

It's funny how US libertarians regularly claim to be for smaller governments, but in doing so, invariably end up in situations w

Why doesn't the gov have the right to mandate it? It's a health issue. They can quarantine you in cases of epidemics. Actually, since unvaccinated people are effectively an epidemic waiting to happen, perhaps we should just quarantine them. I understand we have a lovely mostly vacant seaside facility available with a nice tropical climate.

Very well, since lack of vaccination in a person is a public health issue due to weakening herd immunity, you get the choice between being vaccinated or preventively quarantined until you get vaccinated. Your individual freedom pretty much ends when it endangers the health of others.

If not vaccinating meant that only your kids had the risk of contracting the disease, I'd agree with you. As a parent, you would bear the responsibility for weighing your options and choosing whether or not to vaccinate. It would still be a very good idea, just not a government mandated good idea.

However, when a parent decides not to vaccinate, they put others at risk: The elderly (too old to have gotten the vaccine), the very young (too young to get the vaccine yet), and those with medical reasons for not vaccinating (allergies, immune system disorders, etc). When an action you take could result in the injuring or death of other people, I think it's a perfect time for government to act.

The problem with this argument is that your unvaccinated (due to your choice) kid can kill my unvaccinated (not due to my choice) kid, when otherwise my kid would live a normal life.

Kids under six months of age can't be vaccinated against pertussis, so those who opt out after that age increase the risk of death for kids younger than this. Some people have allergies that prevent vaccination.

So, this isn't a choice that parents make that subject only their own children to risk, but it affects everybody. That makes it everybody's business, and hence in the realm of government regulation.

And yes, I often lean libertarian, but a completely legitimate function of government is to protect individuals from bad choices that other people make.

So, this isn't a choice that parents make that subject only their own children to risk, but it affects everybody. That makes it everybody's business, and hence in the realm of government regulation.

The same essential argument was used by the supreme court in Wickard V. Filburn [wikipedia.org]. Unfortunately, IMHO, it is a line of reasoning that can be too easily abused to enforce by law certain viewpoints over others.

I hope you're for being thrown out of hospitals with sick your child(ren) too.

Because that's starting to happen when they show up with their unvaccinated little plaguebearer that sends everyone immunocompromised(which are quite a lot, including pretty much everyone elderly) scrambing for the emergncy exits.

"A vaccination is an individual decision "false- Not all vaccines are 100%. This is one reason why herd immunity is critical.- These people my not be able to be vaccinated for medical reasons.- They may go home to family members you are elderly, or too young to be vaccinated.

When you don't get vaccinated, you harm others pretty directly, same with smoking, BTW.

I work in the NHS in the UK and it's amazing how some people don't want to get their kids vaccinated, solely because of the infamous Wakefield study and the subsequent media scare. I saddens me deeply to think that we could eradicate these diseases, but through ignorance and fear a minority of parents decline vaccination for their children. Children die of pertussis, children die of measles. These are achingly preventable, and no child ever asks for the disease. The parent is immune however.

For those that want to give the anti-vaccinators something to argue about, the summary title is misleading. From TFA:

"Diphtheria-Tetanus-acellular-Pertussis vaccine (DTaP) is recommended for all children at 2, 4, 6 and 15–18 months of age, with a pre-school booster between 4 years of age and entry into kindergarten.""Infants too young to have completed the primary vaccine series account for the lion’s share of pertussis-related complications, hospitalizations and deaths (at least four in Oregon since 2003). We reviewed data on infants hospitalized with pertussis during a two-year period from March 2009 through February 2011. One hundred forty-six infants with pertussis were reported during this time, and 62 (43%) of them were hospitalized for a median of 3 (range, 0–32) days. The median age at onset for hospitalized cases was 8 (range, 2–25) weeks."

So in other words, many children hospitalized for whooping cough were too young to have been fully vaccinated.

In principle... pertussis could be eradicated; but we have a long way to go.

Ummm.... no. Unlike measles or polio, pertussis is a bacterial disease. Bordatella Pertussis can live without humans. The only way to eradicate it is to sterilize all of its potential habitats (unlike viruses, bacteria don't need hosts per se) and clear the disease from any human carriers.

There's a lot of Bordetella out there, but the only known reservoir of Bordetella pertussis (the causative organism of whooping cough) is in humans. It cannot live without humans. While pertussis is exceedingly contagious, it is a "fastidious" organism, and can survive only a few hours outside of human hosts. It can be eradicated, in theory, by universal vaccination. The fact that it's a bacteria and not a virus is not relevant. (See Lancet. 2006;367(9526):1926, and Hewlett E. Bordetella species. In: Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 5th ed, Mandell GL, Bennett JE, Dolin R (Eds), Churchill Livingstone, Philadelphia 2000. p.2701.)

McCarthy has blood on her hands. She used her celebrity status to influence a generation of easily-swayed women to put their babies at risk. The madness would have gone nowhere without her help because the vapid 20-somethings never would have known about that "study" without the hype created by McCarthy. She became the mouthpiece of madness.

I don't vaccinate my kid. Not because I'm afraid of autism (as noted before, the autism link is flat out not there). But because the risks on either side are so minimal that I don't see the point.

The odds of my kid being exposed to, say, pertussis are about 10%. The odds of her contracting the disease (ie the bacteria taking hold and causing symptoms) is about 0.5%. The odds of her having a serious case of the disease (involving hospitalization) is about 0.01%. The odds of her having any sort of permanent disability/harm are about 0.005%. And the odds of death are about 0.0001%.

In contrast, the odds of having a mild reaction (mild fever, cold/flu symptoms, localized swelling) to a pertussis vaccine are about 1%. The odds of having a major reaction (lengthy illness, actually getting pertussis, etc) are about.01%. The odds of having a major allergic reaction to the vaccine are about.008%. The odds of having brain swelling, fever that causes brain damage, or other severe outcomes is about 0.005%. And the odds of death are about 0.00005%. And even with the vaccine, the odds of her still contracting the disease are about 2%--with all the odds of the above multiplied by a factor of.02.

In short, the risk involved in either course of action is ridiculously small--similar odds with winning the Lotto. BUT getting the vaccine costs me money, time (a trip to the doctor), possible fear of the doctor (something I don't want her to be afraid of) and discomfort/pain to my child.

I've weighed the risks. I've done a cost/benefit analysis for both courses of action. And I (and my wife) choose not to vaccinate. And yes, we have done similar comparisons for each and every vaccine that is offered, from the Diptheria, Pertussis, Tetanus (DTaP) vaccine to the HPV vaccine to the Chicken Pox/Varicella vaccine. And none of them make a definitive case that vaccination is orders-of-magnitude better than non-vaccination.

I have not ruled out the possibility that I will reevaluate that cost/benefit and risk analysis at some later stage in her life (say, when she goes to pre-school) and come to a different conclusion.

So again, I ask, what in all these odds and risks and everything, makes me evil for not vaccinating my child?

What makes you evil? Predicating your cost-benefit analysis on pertussis statistics that assume that everyone else is vaccinated.

Incidentally, if you're in the US and have health insurance, the cost of vaccines for children should be zero and the time should be about two minutes tacked on to a pediatrician visit you're already making.

1) No one is more familiar and in a better position to understand a child than their parents. Parents spend huge amounts of time dealing with their child and learning their quirks, emotions, and knowing their history.

2) Parents expend vast, enormous amounts of resources raising their children, and are directly and massively affected by the decisions that affect their children.

3) Without a doubt and by orders of magnitude, parents are most invested and concerned about their children's well being. There is simply no comparison to the love and care a parent feels towards their children. If there are people who can be trusted to do their best for a child, it's their parents.

4) Parents are legally obligated to provide the resources necessary for a child until they are 18, and to deal with the results of that child.

5) Parents MAY not always be the most rational decision makers concerning their children, and MAY not be the most expert on the decision at hand.

The obvious conclusion from this information is that PARENTS, by large orders of magnitude, are the ones who should be making decisions for their children. They are the defacto most trusted, invested, and authoritative people capable of making the decisions. In my opinion, the government should only step in when it is clear that the parents are giving worse general and long term care than the alternative (IE foster homes, etc.). That line is very, very low.

People do benefit from it. Ex-Playboy models can sell books and go around talk shows. Discredited doctors can get grants from people desperate to find an autism cure. Alternative Medicine companies can sell sugar pills... I mean, Homeopathic remedies for diseases. There is money to be made here. Probably a lot more than to be made by selling vaccines.

Parents are not give some magic ability to know science, or understand medicine.Mom aren't magic and there gut feelings are wrong more then right. Fortunately on most matters there isn't an immediate effect.

That parents decision is killing children. When it comes to vaccines, I would welcome back the days where all the children got there shots at the school.

The only people I trust less than qualified, vetted, officials is uneducated jackasses pretending to understand the world around them when really they are just ignorant twits. There is a mantra from conservatives "They think they know better than you!". Um, yep. I think the scientists and knowledgeable health professionals "know better" than the backward backwater assholes who raise their children as if it were the year 1512. Obviously that isn't a general rule -- bureaucrats make all sorts of boneheaded decisions -- but I basically reject the notion that only you can know what is best for you in all circumstances. No; no, no, no; often, others know what is best for you, and people should be open to that possibility.

If we lived in a perfect world, then parents would be rational, intelligent, and informed. Yes, we would all "rather" live in that world. But we don't, we live in a world full of hysterical ignoramuses. (Same basic argument against libertarianism.)

Public Health is a funny thing -- individual actions impact the health of our entire society.

The libertarian in me says that you should be able to make health decisions for your own [and kids] body, including unbelievably stupid things like declining vaccines. However, disease is hard to track -- if your action or negligence causes me physical injury, the libertarian philosophy suggests that you pay the bills. It's hard to employ that tactic for communicable disease. If it's very difficult to measure who is giving the disease to whom, how do we apply libertarian philosophy?

I'd remind you that
(a) this is by and large a state issue, not federal. You're blindly attacking the wrong people, and
(b) this is a generally a bureaucratic and technocratic issue, not a political issue. Public health experts recommend policies, not politicians seeking votes, and
(c) most government folks working for government are civil servants, not politicians. They're just interested in doing their job well, earning a fair wage, and leading a comfortable middle class lifestyle, just like nearly all of us. This idea that "they are sick (control freaks)" is really nonsensical and based on absolutely nothing but your bias. Are individuals troublesome in any organization? To be sure. But you're painting with a remarkably broad brush.

From where I sit, failing to vaccinate a child is reckless endangerment, and social services should get involved. It's easy and inexpensive to reduce your kid's chances of dying from whooping cough to almost zero. Vaccinations. In fact, I submit that since every adult was once a kid, we ought to just cover everybody's vaccinations at childhood 100% by medicare. No insurance, no co-pay, no out of pocket, for both poor and middle class and rich Americans. Hell, I'd include non-citizens too, since the public health costs to citizens can be very high whereas prevention is relatively cheap. Since most parents do this anyway, the net cost for individuals is a wash. Yeah, some old folks end up cross-subsidizing young people, but its a relatively small expense for a good and sustainable public policy.

If I'm going to have my kids near your kids, you damned well better have them vaccinated. If you're willing to keep them out of public, vaccinated events and areas (stadia, soccer leagues, public schools, the private school _I_ go to, public parks, my private club, etc.), then have at it.

Just as I don't want you to come into work with the flu, or shake my hand if you've got an open wound on your palm, please don't force your kids to infect the rest of the world with your 19th century diseases.

Did you know that after 50 years, we were almost rid of Polio? The International Rotary Foundation, and now with the help and massive warchest of the Bill Gates Foundation (to the historical combines tune of something like a Billion dollars) is trying to get rid of the last pockets of Polio on this planet. All it takes is one small village, mostly isolated from everyone, to keep this stuff around - destroying lives and families.

Please excuse me if I take this opportunity to say a hearty "FUCK YOU, GET YOUR GOD DAMNED KIDS VACCINATED" and quit perpetuating these diseases. This doesn't come from the government, it's from your next door neighbor, a parent who cares about his kids. Trust me.

1. This IS a matter of public safety. Your choice to not vaccinate your kids can potentially increase my own risk of getting some disease. I might not be vaccinated against something due to an allergy, or other contraindication. Or, maybe I was vaccinated but I was one of those rare people that did not receive immunity from the vaccine. With vaccination there is safety in numbers, so these small corner cases don't have much impact as long as everybody else gets vaccinated.

2. I don't see the point in letting parents make a choice without punishing them, but then punishing them if that choice results in a bad outcome. If the risks that choice brings are unacceptable, then outlaw the choice, not the consequences. This is like telling people that they can drive drunk as long as nobody gets killed, or letting somebody off the hook for a botched assassination attempt because they missed their target.

Due to negative publicity about this vaccine, the use of the pertussis vaccine decreased in many areas of the world. For example, in Japan, children stopped receiving the pertussis vaccine by 1975. In the three years before the vaccine was discontinued, there were 400 cases of pertussis and 10 deaths from pertussis. In the three years after the pertussis vaccine was discontinued, there were 13,000 cases of pertussis and 113 deaths from pertussis! It should be noted that although the side effects of the old pertussis vaccine were high, no child ever died from pertussis vaccine.

Vaccinations aren't so much to protect your child, but all children (or people)..Infants can't get the vaccination until they reach a certain age.. it is VERY important that people around the infant NOT have whooping cough. There are some kids that can't get it for other reasons (maybe a weakened immune system or something).. your vaccinating your child, helps prevent the spread of these diseases to kids who can't get the vaccine.. if it was just 1% of the population that wasn't vaccinated, (well, less) th

Pertussis (booster) vaccination is indeed recommended (by the CDC) for all adults in the United States, ages 21-65, and for adults over 65 if they have contact with small children (http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/adult-schedule.htm#hcp). Recommendations are similar in Canada, and Australia, and, I imagine, elsewhere.